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INTERVIEW ON ASCENSION

Annie Morris piles up signs in a sort of
automatic writing, until the work becomes abstract and keeps the color alive in
its rawest form, packing the pigment from which “Stacks of Joy” emerge (literally
metaphors of pure joy): sculptures shaped with plaster and sand, densely
colored, or cast in bronze. A banquet for the eyes, on view at ProjectB gallery in Milan, for the first solo show by the English artist in Italy.

CLB From the years in Paris at the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts, one can see the importance of the gesture and the line of the
drawing: the foundation elements of all your work…

AM I keep going back to drawing, I’m
obsessed by the line and by artists who draw, like Jean Cocteau, Paul Klee,
Louise Bourgeois and Picasso; the lines of art
that inspire me, the starting point of all my work.

CLB Notably
the “Face Paintings” born from an impressive number of details that
characterize your delicate pictorial gesture. Canvases dense with signs and
shadings, where the contours of faces, bundled together and replicated to
infinity, emerge from pale backgrounds…

Jean Neal: The emotional impact of her
pictorial gesture accompanies us in the passage from figurative to abstract…

CLB From the paintings hung on the walls to
the sculptures that stand at the heart of the show…

AM The “Stacks” began in a dark period, but
they represent joy and hope…

JN They defy the law of gravity, rising to
the sky!

AM They have been defined as “the impossibility
of stacking” and effectively they came from an impossibility: they contain an infantile
but at the same time sophisticated note.

CLB As a student of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe
Penone you have gone forward with the passion for sculpture, mystery and color…

AM I wanted to keep the color compact and
raw, but delicate at the same time; almost a way of painting in which the
colored balls are my brushstroke.

JN They function as signifiers from whole a tradition of making, that are uniquely specific to women’s art.

AM The fragility and the “handmade” aspect
are important, as in the “Thread Drawings” that are expressive in the contrast
between the freedom of drawing and the precision of embroidery.

JN Two aspects coexist in Annie’s works:
what you see – the line and the sense of form – and what you feel.

CLB Annie, how do you perceive your work in
this space?

AM What I like is that it communicates a
condensed history of my work: a feeling of controlled freedom.